What is the Evidence for Medical Marijuana to Treat the Addiction Epidemic?

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Created: 20 August 2018

The Marijuana Policy Project promotes their drug as a substitute for opiate pain pills. Like the worst offenders in the opiate industry, the cannabis lobby follows an addiction-for-profit business model. Their master plan needs 80% of the demand to be met by 20% of the users. Science shows no evidence for using medical marijuana as a substitute for pain pills.

A large-scale, major study from Australia demonstrates that cannabis doesn’t work as a substitute for opiate pills in instances of chronic, non-cancer pain. The study came out in July, 2018 and it supports the findings of an American study published in September, 2017.

It seems we should NOT be encouraging “medical” marijuana use if our goal is to stop addiction. Theodore Caputi and Keith Humphreys recently published in the Journal of Addiction: Medical marijuana users are more likely to use prescription drugs medically and nonmedically. They concluded: “Medical marijuana users should be a target population in efforts to combat nonmedical prescription drug use.” See our page on Marijuana vs. Pain Pills.

The Canadian Family Physicians wrote an editorial about Medical Marijuana in February, 2018, p. 87, after devoting an entire issue to the journal on medical marijuana. Like the NAS report in the United States, the Canadian physicians reviewed hundreds of relevant studies. In the editorial, they concluded:

“Evidence indicates the most consistent effects of medical cannabinoids are adverse events. A variety of adverse events have a greater magnitude of effect than the potential benefits for the conditions targeted.